It's not that Lillian is particularly
adventurous or brave, but she's driven,
with a tremendous capacity for endur-
ance and a dark sense of humor. When
she was a girl, her father told her that
she was lucky when she fell in the
river twice and didn't drown or die of
pneumonia. And he told her that she
was smart and pretty but "lucky was
better than them both put together."
He also said, "You
make your own
luck." And she does.
Although most of
her travel adventures
hardly seem the stuff
of luck, that she gets
out alive and able to
keep moving recalls
her father's words.
Lillian encounters
train porters who
let her stow away in
a broom closet for
a price, a prostitute
named Gumdrop who
takes her in when she is beaten up,
Christian missionaries who pray for
her good fortune as they try to reform
her, women "in trouble but not really
bad" who are her cellmates when she's
confined to a work camp and an iso-
lated telegraph operator who shows
her kindness, even as she is lice-cov-
ered and limping.
At times, she prays, she steals, she
remembers, she keeps going, making
sense of the vast foreign land around
her. Several characters share their
stories of love and loss, but Lillian is
spare in revealing her own.
At times in Alaska she walks 20
miles a day. "When she can, Lillian
walks to a waltz. She walks to a
mazurka for four miles, to a foxtrot
for another four. She walks to as much
ragtime as she can remember ... The
spaces between the trees will fill in
slowly until the woods around her
are a spiked gray wall, and Lillian has
learned to make herself sleep in the
endless, disturbing dusk. She sings the
sad, raspy lullabies her mother had
sung to her and she'd sung to Sophie:
children lost, lovers separated, crops
failing — dirges, all of them, and
oddly cheering:' Bloom writes.
As Lillian moves on, Bloom's nar-
rative occasionally pauses to fill in
the reader on what will happen to
the characters Lillian leaves behind.
As Bloom explains, "My own sense of
people with difficult lives it that you
don't get to keep around everyone you
want to keep around."
She has created a narrator's voice

that is both a kind of classic 19th-
century voice and modern — "an old-
fashioned 21st-century omniscient
narrator:' as she puts it.
"I don't think of it as being set in
the past. For those people it was not
their past, but their present. I wanted
to create their modern world!"
Bloom, 54, is the mother of three
adult children. Earlier this fall, she was
remarried at her home
outside New Haven,
Conn. In the spring
semester, she teaches
creative writing at Yale.
She also is an executive
producer, a writer and a
creator of the Lifetime
Network television series
State of Mind.
While Bloom used
to serve on the board
of her synagogue, she
now puts her energy
into local politics, serv-
ing on the Democratic
Town Committee in Durham, Conn.
Although trained as a therapist, she no
longer practices.
"I learned how to listen to people,
how not to finish their sentences, how
to observe them closely:' she says, of
the connection between being a novel-
ist and therapist. "By and large," she
continues, "I don't think being a thera-
pist makes you insightful?'
The granddaughter of immigrants,
Bloom says she finds issues of foreign-
ness and language particularly interest-
ing. Her father's father kept a short jour-
nal of his journey to America, and her
father had it translated from Yiddish.
Her mother's mother had limited
English skills, and as Bloom explains,
it was "clear to her that the world was
divided into nice and not so nice.
Before 1915 was not so nice; after that
was nice." Her grandparents rarely
spoke about the past, and there was
"something about the stories you don't
get told" that intrigued her.
"I just think that so much is
unknown about the people who make
that kind of journey. As the children
and grandchildren of those people, we
hear how they moved into an apart-
ment, then a house — that's the story
that has been crafted, like a bedtime
story. It has nothing to do with what
really happened?'
Lillian lingers with the reader long
after the novel is finished, and it's
pleasant to have her around. She's no
romantic, but indeed, she makes her
own luck, losing everything and find-
ing love.

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